Savage Love Read online

  In his laudanum dreams he sees himself commanding the rearguard against Death and the intrepid Black Imps of Satan. But he’s tired of fighting.

  Edith bears herself in silence. You can see her thinking fiercely. There is much to remember, much to tally, going toward the Gate.

  I shall go to him, she thinks, but he shall not return to me.

  Sgt. Collins minds me watching, calls me, “Here, Lazarus,” like a dog.

  I think there’s an earthquake but then notice I am trembling violently with ague. I note the telltale horripilation of the skin.

  I am hallucinating, or the place seems tremendously holy. You can reach out a hand and touch the Other World.

  A kindly apothecary’s mate of the 41st, someone I once knew, wraps a blanket over my shoulders and bids me come closer to the fire. But I want to watch. I am already nostalgic for the yeasty richness of life, its sudden turns and dramas, its deep sadness, its mysterious and gorgeous purposelessness.

  No one knows why Collins cares for Edith, but he is sudden and belligerent and understands by doing, not thinking. He accepts what he cannot parse, doesn’t mind that he will die, despises pain but doesn’t fear it, and thus is completely at home in the world.

  The girl from the clifftop feeds him soup while he chafes Edith’s hand. She fears only that this moment will end, afraid she will be left to change her dress and become a wife. For her too, action has leaped beyond what she can know. She thinks all life must be quest for style.

  An hour before daylight, a dreadful, somnolent calm falls upon the beach. Fires down to embers, the living, dead and dying blanketed lumps in the sand, one or two, still awake, stare at the glowing coals.

  The girl says, “It’s my wedding night.” She pulls Collins down beside the jacent Edith.

  Only one person has an eye to see, sleepless for fear he will sleep and die.

  In the morning, a white rime of frost blankets the sleeping and the dead. The lake is still as ice.

  Edith’s skin is like the lake, translucent, blue and cold.

  I shall go to him, she thinks.

  Surgeon Kennedy presses her eyelids shut, thinking how she has attained invisibility (a flame, a burst of light) and a higher knowledge.

  Sgt. Collins draws a uniform from stores, hangs it over his bones, whistles through his teeth hefting a new Springfield and a bayonet, tools of the trade. He is a man happy to have enemies, a regular Jonathan among the Philistines, and the Americans are so handy and numerous.

  We blink, we wake up, we are in Canada, we are among the living.

  It’s not so much, state of anticlimax, chilly, damp, vexing people.

  The sunlight over the lake is like milk.

  In Sandusky, we were in the company of saints. We thought God was in the worms and maggots that ate the dead. Smoke blasts from the horses’ nostrils. Soldiers in red jackets (embers, flames) blow on their hands, kick sand over fires, piss against the cliff. The chinking of harness sounds cheerful and mundane.

  The girl in the wedding dress takes a seat in the wounded wagon. Her face is pale, pinched, fierce and proud.

  At the top of the track, as the wagons trundle through the village, the girl’s husband strides along beside, waving his bandana like a pennant, begging her to get down. But she doesn’t answer, doesn’t look.

  Remnants of a wedding, slab tables in a stumpy field, clusters of wild asters in pots, a flag, a spit and a smoking ash pit.

  She takes one final glance at the slate expanse of the lake, landscape of unease, imbrued with qualities that contradict reality.

  At the last sorry log house, where a loyal Canadian pig roots in a garbage heap and another stands at the open front door, the husband stops and shies a rock at the departing column, face crimson with fury.

  Five men of the 41st silently fall out, stack their muskets and chase him down among the houses, beating him unconscious with their fists.

  Two weeks later, Sgt. Collins volunteers to go slaughter more Americans and dies (a tongue of flame, explosion of light) leading militia against the Kentucky cavalry at Malcolm’s Mills. It is said the Canadians panicked and broke, leaving him on the field, where his body was much abused by Kickapoo scouts.

  Of the girl, nothing else is known.

  INTERMEZZO

  MICROSTORIES

  The Ice Age

  Dead of winter. Snow falling for days on end. Snow up to the rooftops. School cancelled. The yard is as bright and blank as a computer screen.

  The children and I climb onto the roof with plastic shovels. We carve a fantasy of crenellated walls marching along the eaves and over the peak, with watchtowers at the corners and a gate with snowmen for guards. It takes all afternoon. We dangle a pair of my undershorts from a rake handle for a flag. We name it the Castle of Narth.

  At night, the neighbours come over, and we climb the roof with camp chairs, sleeping bags, and down comforters and crouch around Coleman lanterns, sipping Swedish vodka inside the castle walls, watching shooting stars between the drifting clouds. The children toss tennis balls for the dog, who leaps off the roof with its ears streaming, then swims back through the snow like a seal.

  The Snivelys have not been getting along of late, the usual tectonic drift of marriage. She says the snow makes her think of Eskimos. She asks did we know that Eskimo men share their wives with strangers, and looks at me. Snively swan-dives off the roof, then climbs back with a lopsided, embarrassed grin.

  The next day, it snows again, almost silent except for the infinite whispers of flakes. City plows block the driveways, then vanish to concentrate on the main streets and arterials. By consensus, the drone of snow blowers goes into remission. The children burrow tunnels between houses, constructing elaborate mazes where they play hide-and-seek and ambush the dog with snowballs. Snively’s boy Mose and the Czernik girl, both high school seniors, lose their way, switch off their phones, and canoodle in a forgotten hollow.

  My wife discovers a bag of votive candles and says, “These might come in handy.” And then she says, “I wish Loreen Snively wouldn’t look at you like that.”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “You know,” she says.

  We snap on cross-country skis and shush to the strip mall, dragging a toboggan for supplies, past brand new backyard skating rinks, golf-course toboggan runs, knots of red-faced, laughing children, regiments of snowmen. My wife sticks out her tongue to catch the flakes, which makes me want to kiss her for about eight hours.

  That night, the TV forecasts Arctic Clippers and blizzards. Pundits speak earnestly of a new Ice Age. But the Internet rumours of power outages in the North, vanished towns, wolves appearing on the city outskirts, have more the flavour of UFO sightings than anything real.

  My wife climbs the roof and lights candles along the castle walls. The castle looks like a fairy tale, a dream of fire, blazing up against the falling flakes like a bubble of light.

  The neighbours arrive with pots of stew and torrents of mulled wine. We sing campfire songs and golden oldies and watch the children nodding in the lamplight, hot in their synthetic down and microfibre cocoons.

  Loreen Snively says her dreams the night before were disturbed by men in fur returning from the hunt, flinging down carcasses of polar bear and seal, and having their way with her. Snively says we ought to start planning hunting parties, maybe train the dog to sledding. “You never know,” he says, trying to look prudent and manly in his faux rabbit fur Mad Bomber hat.

  My wife cuddles with our eight-year-old against me. She gives a little shiver, though she can’t be cold.

  We watch the candles on the castle walls gutter and go out.

  The Poet Fishbein

  After the incident in the commuter jet restroom, the poet Fishbein found a new career counselling troubled teenagers in a Staten Island halfway house, in part to fulfill his court-mandated
eight hundred hours of community service but also because he genuinely enjoyed working with young people, seeing himself in every bad boy with spiked hair, tats, stainless steel tongue ball, and purple eyeshadow. One evening, Fishbein and a half-dozen residents were doing ecstasy in front of the fireplace as a cheery fire consumed cheerily the last of the maple-finish kitchen chairs, when the new staff volunteer, Reguiba Placentia, a recovering crack addict, sex worker and early childhood education professional, exploded through the door. “What the fuck is going on?” “Group therapy,” said Fishbein dreamily. He found Reguiba, whom he had never seen before in his life, strangely familiar and mysteriously attractive. “Are you the guy who set his shoe on fire over Minneapolis?” she asked. Fishbein decided it would be better to use mental telepathy to explain to her the complicated situation involving the joint that flared up and scorched his moustache, how he simultaneously dropped the joint and jerked his head back, knocking himself nearly unconscious on the commuter jet restroom mirror, how the joint somehow became entangled in his sneaker laces, causing the plastic trim to smoulder and, yes, emit some noxious smoke, which Fishbein didn’t really notice at first because he was trying to see if his head was cut by spying in the mirror through his peripheral vision, how finally the smoke alarm sounded and things suddenly became truly confusing — the words “shoe bomb” and “terrorist” came into the picture in ways he had yet to understand completely. After explaining all this telepathically, Fishbein realized Reguiba was still waiting for an answer, so he pointed to a pale, limp, neurasthenic, semi-conscious boy named Julian and said, “That would be him.”

  The Night Glenn Gould

  Played “Chopsticks”

  The woman in 314 has a walleye, claims to have suffered a spiritual crisis when she was fourteen that led to bleeding from her palms and feet, claims also to have once lived in Glenn Gould’s apartment building in Toronto and heard him playing “Chopsticks” one night from the roof, claims also to be a witch.

  Tell the press I am unavailable for comment.

  Don’t be afraid, I tell myself. None of the things you fear the worst will come to pass.

  Glenn died at the age of fifty, I am fifty. When I was thirty-three, I couldn’t get over the fact that they crucified Jesus when he was thirty-three. It’s the same with Glenn.

  Buddy

  Buddy is seven and sweet and fat and slow to speak like his dad and a latchkey kid of long standing and considerable resources since his dad is gone and I work two jobs to keep the household floating. Days, I work as a teaching aide for the special-needs kids at the elementary school, and nights, I work a flex shift transcribing medical dictation for the pediatric clinic. Days, Buddy goes to the elementary school, and when he’s done he walks home and plays Halo on Xbox and eats Cheetos and macaroni and raises more fat cells. I am a responsible mother, but aside from making enough money to meet the house payments, also the phone and electricity, and keep him supplied with macaroni and Cheetos, I haven’t got time for much else. One weekend I took him to the beach, but he complained of sunstroke and West Nile virus and said there were dead things floating in the water. Another time we tried hiking at the state park, and Buddy lay down on the trail claiming dehydration and snakebite when we were still in sight of the parking lot. I blame my husband for taking off like that and living on the other side of the country with another woman named Millie (she is really nice and a Christian and was married to our pastor before the trouble). And then I blame myself for being too proud to take him to court and make him pay me to keep Buddy. I thought I could handle everything myself, a moment of hubris and lack of prudence I might now reconsider, though no one else will. I have a degree in classics from a respected college and a thirteen-year-old Volvo that Buddy’s dad left instead of love. And a house with payments and a dog named Phanto of nondescript breed and personality. We live in the most Christian state in the Union, where churches and golf courses are the most common landmarks. The only fun I have is watching amateur porn sites on the Internet and playing with myself under the covers late at night when Buddy is asleep. This is not much of a life for a girl, let me tell you. But I console myself that it is only temporary. Soon Buddy will grow up and learn to take care of himself (or else he will become the state’s responsibility). By then I will be across the Great Divide and on the downhill slope, waiting for breast cancer or some other such mercy, and death will put an end to this long regret.

  Hôtel des Suicides

  The girl looks familiar, and over sherry in the afternoon I admire the partial nudity of her skull, the pierced flesh, the rings in her lip.

  She reciprocates, alluding to my eye patch, which on this occasion I have remembered to wear.

  She knows nothing of her past, thinks “the war” is something that happened in Iraq and that we won it. She has a self like window glass, believes that irony is imperialism, threw a balloon inflated with her own blood at a mounted policeman in front of what she thought was the American embassy but was in fact a US Airways ticket office.

  I tell her she reminds me of someone.

  I look like you, she says.

  Twins

  My twin brother Buddy shot his best friend Richard Maliciwicz to death in the garage the year we were twelve. He has always regarded this as the turning point in his life, that things got better afterward. I never shot anyone. Consequently (according to Buddy), my life has all been downhill. I wanted to be an artist but wound up in computer call centres (of course, I’ve been on disability for years and have forgotten everything I ever learned about computers). I marked life’s stages with nervous breakdowns — at age sixteen (the first time I had sex), at twenty-two (college graduation), at twenty-seven (marriage), at twenty-eight (divorce), and thirty-three (first job).

  Buddy took a sociology course in college and will say things like, “It’s a mistake not to think we’re born from violence, that violence and sacrifice aren’t at the root of the family and everything it stands for. I made myself the day I shot Richard. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard on him. But we all need our Richard Maliciwicz.” And it’s true — Buddy has had a happy life. I find it shocking and mysterious how Fate has rewarded him. He enjoys a booming academic career with a well-paid consulting business on the side (he gives human relations seminars to large corporations). He loves his wife. They are raising two sons, ages eight and ten.

  I admit it’s unnerving to see the way he casually leaves his hunting rifle around the house. My heart stops whenever I’m over there and see his sons playing with the neighbourhood kids. “They might shoot me,” says Buddy airily. “Or each other, or you.” Sometimes I think he’s insane. But I’m the demonstrable madman in the family, so my opinion carries little weight.

  Splash

  In the early days, when settlers first scraped out their meagre holdings along Lake Erie’s north shore, it was not uncommon for fishermen to catch mermaids in their nets. Dumped on the beach, the poor things died quickly, their darting eyes turning to gelid orbs, their hair becoming brittle like coral as it dries, their pitiful cries dwindling as their gills gaped spasmodically for oxygen. Dead, they were more like pubescent children, with seahorse tails, triangular faces, pointed ears, translucent skin above their scale lines, and veins green instead of blue. I saw a preserved specimen once in the home of a distant relative whose ancestors had been slavers in the Caribbean before coming to Canada in the nineteenth century. The little corpse was exhibited in a green glass jar the size of a puncheon, suspended in olive oil, its tail folded up in front of its face, its eyes shut, its arms and hands crossed neatly over its breasts. There is a persistent Internet rumour that another individual, less well preserved, is kept locked in a vault in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

  Xo & Annabel,

  A Psychological Romance

  The second night, when it was clear that something was starting between them, Xo began to lie to Annabel, tiny lies at first, minuscul
e evasions, shy reticences. It was not only that he wanted to impress Annabel but that he yearned to be in love with the sort of woman who would fall for the kind of man he pretended to be.

  Wolven

  After they made love the first time, things got strange. He peeped through the window blinds, shook himself like a dog, and muttered something about the moon. Then he said, “You must chain me in the closet. Whatever happens, don’t let me out. Lock the door. There’s a deadbolt.” She was drunk and naked and limbic, not thinking with her forebrain, something much lower.

  “Then what?” she asked flirtatiously.

  Little Things

  I think — I believe — Elind is trying to kill me.

  Little things.

  The other night I woke struggling with a pillow over my face.

  She said she was making me comfortable.

  Last month I had severe stomach poisoning. When he pumped my stomach, the doctor said I must have eaten a bowl of Weed & Feed mistaking it for porridge.

  Otherwise she is loving and attentive in the old way.

  And I keep my suspicions to myself, not wanting to hurt her feelings. She likes to be needed.

  THE COMEDIES

  The Lost Language of Ng

  According to the Maya, their grandfathers, the Ng, refused to assimilate with later civilizations but instead retreated, after a period of decadence and decline, into the southern jungles whence they had emerged. They are rumoured to be living there still, a hermetic and retired existence, keeping the Secret Names in their hearts, playing their sacred ball game, and copulating with their women to inflate the world skin bladder and supply the cosmos with ambient energy, the source of all life.